


The Day of Common Man

by chameleonchanging



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Gen, moiforum
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-01
Updated: 2018-01-01
Packaged: 2018-11-13 21:34:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11193894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chameleonchanging/pseuds/chameleonchanging
Summary: Maine remembers the New Year seven days late and goes about festivities the same way he does everything else in life: with single-minded determination that everything will be just fine if he keeps going.





	The Day of Common Man

It's been busy aboard the _Mother of Invention_. Between training and the odd mission run, time has slipped away and before Maine's realized it New Year’s has come and gone. He's been been cutting his hair, his quarters haven't been cleaned, and he's pretty sure breaking gym equipment by accident on New Year's Day in lieu of popping someone's head off like a champagne cork also mostly by accident carries intent close enough to killing something.

Bad luck for the beginning of a new year at his new station.

But Maine hasn't gotten to where he is by giving up and letting things go. He never learned how to. What he knows is if he takes a hit and staggers to his feet, his odds are better than if he stays down; is if he keeps going he'll get what he wants eventually, be it by skill or pity or sheer persistence.

He sees no reason for luck to be any different.

 

_(Zero)_

His eyes flick to the image of Zao Shen. Two weeks late to burn it. Maybe the kitchen has a gallon of honey he could requisition, glue the messenger's mouth shut before he sends him on his merry way. Twenty minutes and three wrong turns later, he has a bear-shaped bottle of dried bee vomit in hand. He doesn't remember why it has to be honey; only that his grandmother was particular about it and had made him drive 40 minutes to the closest store to buy some.

He peels the tape off the wall, folds the excess around the corners of the effigy with care, and lays it on the table. A spoonful is enough to cover Zao Shen's mouth - and face, and most of his upper body too. Zao Shen would drown in honey if Maine thought he could get away with it, but the paper has to burn and he thinks he's pushing his limits.

Then he remembers the firing range with associated explosives testing area and decides to hell with it, and uses up the rest of the bottle. The dripping mess goes into a plastic baggie, and he relocates to the range with Zao Shen and a bit of magnesium swiped from the lab back in high school. Everything goes onto the concrete floor, and with the door sealed and several of the staff watching nervously, he pushes the button that drops a lit match onto the sliver of metal.

Fireworks and bright flames are supposed to make the trip to heaven faster, Maine notes behind the tinted glass, [ watching his concoction blaze away ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_CZMv6NFqg). Short of an actual grenade, this will be the fastest trip ever. When the arc light fades, nothing is left.

Let the moral surveillance begin, he thinks. He starts by cleaning his room, which isn’t messy to begin with. There’s a bunk and a dresser, and if he stands up his footlocker he has a nightstand too. The only personal touches are the books stacked on the provided desk and the shrine tucked away in the corner, where an orange sits on the lacquered upside-down tray with a few unlit sticks of incense and a small bowl of water.

It doesn’t take long to tidy up; footlocker under the bunk, everything dusted, floors swept, and the dirt taken out with his trash.

 

_(One)_

Slipspace travel makes inter-system telecommunications an exercise in coordination, but somehow the mail gets where it’s supposed to go. Sometimes it’s four months late, like the notice of his fourth-youngest fake cousin’s graduation, but it arrives eventually.

This is what Maine counts on to keep his parents from murdering him by videomail for not calling on the first day of New Year’s. As long as he doesn’t forget to edit the timestamp on his recorded missive, they won’t know he’d forgotten to call them entirely in favor of -

Actually, he can’t think of any reason in particular he didn’t remember. There wasn’t anything pressing, or that couldn’t be shuffled around for twenty minutes while he made a call.

Maybe it’s that New Year was a week ago for everyone else. At home, no one would be uninvolved in preparations. Even at his last posting, there were a few Mainlanders who observed the occasion. Here, it’s just been steel walls day in and day out, and nothing changes with the seasons.

Dad’s sister is deaf, which is why his family on her side signs. He squeezes himself into the computer terminal booth, thinking over what he’s going to say, and then starts up the camera. _Happy new year_ , he signs, and _may you all be prosperous_ , his hands stilling as he clamps down on the urge to finish his blessings and well-wishes with an irreverent children’s joke.

He records another ten minutes of stories from his life, most true, some made up, and all of it careful to skirt around the edges of his job and classified information. When he’s done, he signs off, edits the timestamp, and queues it for the next message transfer. He gets through his next message in halting, rumbling Standard, but the bank will be instructed to triple the monetary support he sends to his parents and grandparents this month, and smaller portions of his income will be sent to his various younger siblings and cousins.

It’s a poor apology for being across the galaxy, but it will have to do.

 

_(Two)_

A message is waiting for him in his account when he finishes, courtesy of the other side of his family and a particularly lucky jump by a passing ship.

His uncle has mostly taken over the role as family patriarch now that Grandpa is almost completely infirm, and he’s doing well enough that Maine doesn’t worry so much for them. His one cousin on Mom’s side has finally started middle school and is cramming Standard every school night on top of his homework. Grandma is doing better now than she was before, but her memory is still spotty. Grandpa has discovered that wine contains antioxidants and is cheaper than grapes.

He lets the wave of words wash over him, enjoying the sounds of his native tongue. None of his new teammates are from his corner of the world, and he doubts any of the crew are either. Certainly the few who have signed back to him do so in American, which is really more of a distant third-language-in-progress for him than something he wants to use on a regular basis, even if it is preferable to sounding the way a lioness looks while she licks her chops and contemplates her dinner. He is reminded every time someone speaks that he is not the same. That he does not belong.

It takes times, he tells himself. A few months is barely enough time to form a meaningful friendship when they’re drifting in space and everyone is running in different directions. Someday this will feel like home.

Sending a reply is awkward because Mom’s family are all hearing, so he has to talk. He takes comfort in the fact that his cousin isn’t likely to be scared of Maine when he’s grown up with a father who thinks the height of hilarity is tricking a gullible seven-year-old into touching an electric fly swatter. They’ll be hearing the same family-friendly stories, but they’ll be hearing them at half speed unless the cousin remembers to play at double time.  

 

_(Three)_

During his last shore leave, Maine found a small shop carrying religious paraphernalia and bought several boxes of incense and paper money. He removes them from his footlocker and takes a few sticks out. Lighting them is out of the question on board; the smell will carry into the hall and possibly through several rooms. He doesn’t want to attract Command’s attention so soon. The Director is - well, he’s the Director, which makes him in charge, which means there’s a part of Maine that would happily walk into hell on his order. It’s a character flaw, that he trusts authority as much as he does. He’s seen that kind of trust burn people alive. Burn his friends alive.

But that is what the incense is for - to remember his honored dead. He’ll ritualize his sorting of memories with smoke and light, and it will be enough because it has to be.

He bows three times towards the shrine with three sticks in his clasped hands, kneels and places them into the holder one by one - for the gods, who are said to be both jealous and easily satisfied. He bows again and adds three more sticks for his deceased ancestors, of whom he has only heard stories. Tradition demands it, and Maine complies because why shouldn’t he? And then the hard part: the people who are dead that he walked beside, fought beside, would have died beside were it not for chance and his own indomitable will to survive.

His hands waver as he settles onto his heels, a litany of names echoing through his head. For each, he repeats a blessing: _may you find peace where you are now that you did not find when you were here_. This, he thinks, is something that soldiers understand, whatever they fought for.

So seven sticks of incense are added to the holder, because if he placed one for every one of his friends who are gone he would be out of incense, and it would look like a porcupine was on his shrine. Seven is a good number, a lucky number.

The paper money is wrapped in plastic with an insert that proclaims it to be ship-safe. It’s made with nitrocellulose, like magician’s paper, and will burn to nothing so quickly that nothing else will have a chance to catch fire. He folds each note in half, working his way through the stack until there is a mountain of paper over the crumbs he’s swept into his broad palm and placed on the floor. He lights one corner of the mountain with a spark from a spent lighter and the entire thing vanishes in a smokeless flash.

The faintest hint of sandalwood drifts through the air when he stands, pins and needles in his legs.

 

_(Four)_

In retrospect, cleaning the shrine before starting his prayers would have been a better order for events, but Maine’s a linear thinker. Visiting the dead comes before cleaning the home shrine; it just so happens that for him, they’re done at the same physical location.

Which leads to the rather awkward situation of needing to remove everything from the shrine that is at least technically in use.

This isn’t the first time he’s gotten himself into trouble by not thinking ahead. He excels in a fight by virtue of being twice as big as the other guy with a ruthless streak miles wide. When he makes a mistake - and he makes plenty of them, he knows - he can get up and try again. He has the luxury of reacting instead of fitting everything into a plan. Someday it will come back to haunt him, just like it did at little brother’s third birthday party.

He stares down at the table. Zao Shen is either tsk-tsk-ing or laughing his ass off. Possibly both.

Maine has a brush that was probably supposed to be used to apply powdered foundation that he uses to clean the dust and soot (if there were any) off the statue of the Buddha. He brushes the body but not the face, and then around the incense holder where bits of sand have come off when he removed the older sticks, which will be visiting the bomb range in the near future.

He contemplates moving the shrine again. It isn’t good to place it in a corner, but it’s also not good to have it in front of his bed or in the closet, and definitely not in plain view of the toilet. So he leaves it where it is, shuffling a few items around. There isn’t much to do, not really - the shrine is cleaned every week, or every other week if he’s not around. As soon as he’s presentable, if he’s just been on a mission. He dusts, sweeps, and replaces the -

Right. The offerings. The water is easily changed; he pours out the old water and washes the dish, and then cracks open a bottle and fills the dish to the midpoint. The orange is starting to creep towards being overripe, as oranges do after sitting around for a week. He plucks it off the tray and peels it, eating each section while trying to remember if there’s something else he’s forgotten to do before he leaves to get a replacement. An apple this time, he thinks. Those are good luck.

 

_(Five)_

Of course, then Maine gets into the kitchen and realizes that the next part involves food anyway, so he should probably do everything at once to minimize the time he’s out of his room, which he isn’t supposed to leave. Well, he isn’t supposed to leave home, and he supposes the MOI counts. Technically.

The day after shrine cleaning is the day his family gets together, packs into the kitchen and living room, and sets up a dumpling assembly line the likes of which would rival any manufacturing plant. Everyone had their own part in the proceedings; Maine’s was to knead the dough and roll out the wrappers.

The dough comes together quickly once he has the water heated, exactly the way he remembers, elastic and springy. When it’s resting under a bowl, he raids the fridge for filling ingredients. Cabbage, he remembers, and pork. But pork has a taste-smell that needs to be covered up, so he takes out a bunch of scallion too. Shiitake is hard to find, but maybe button mushrooms will do as a replacement. Do dumplings have eggs in them? Eh, why not.

He hashes everything, dumps it into a steel bowl, and mixes. Everything has soy sauce in it, so he estimate-pours a couple tablespoons of liquid salt, and then mixes more until the sound of wet, slippery meat paste sliding past itself is too gross for him to put up with any longer - this part is little sister’s job, because she wants to be a doctor and isn’t bothered by gross sounds.

In another ten minutes, he’s looking at a hundred near-perfect flattened circles of dough and a bowl of nightmare fluff, and with a long-suffering exhalation he begins to stuff his dumplings. Nightmare fluff, because he cannot for the life of him get the filling to stay where he wants it while he seals the tiny wrapper, and he can’t even have the satisfaction of smooshing the little demonspawn without pork squirting out of some missed hole and onto the wall. South once teased him over having fat fingers for his laziness (and also hatred of the English language) in typing, but she clearly doesn’t know the half of it. This is the true meaning of hell.

They will have to be fried, Maine thinks. The filling will find a way to come out if he boils them, and pork soup with wet flour circles a dumpling do not make. He lines up the slightly misshapen products of his labor on sheet pans and shoves them into the freezer so they can be stored. Even he won’t manage to get through them all in one sitting.

In the meantime, he cleans up and swipes an apple. Looks at the fruit drawer again, and picks up an orange too, and then goes back to his room.

 

_(Six)_

He takes the long way round, winding through the rec room and then the hangar, watching while people go about their day. A few of the crew are chatting about how a car seat - no, not a booster seat, you idiot, an actual seat that was attached to a Warthog - has gone missing. South is on the training floor again, working on simulations. York’s nowhere to be seen, but he’s been making noise about hair gel and candy hearts around South’s locker lately, so maybe that isn’t so surprising. He hasn’t seen hide nor hair of Florida since the man ran off with Maine’s cheesecake.

Coming back from his room, he thinks about everyone else on board he knows. Or has met, really. Knows of? Washington doesn’t seem to have lost anything recently. Illinois hasn’t had any hilarious bouts of word vomit (South _and_ Florida, hah), more’s the pity. Poor Mac is hopefully enjoying a break from being everyone’s verbal punching bag. Rumor says there’s a pilot who can sign on board, but he hasn’t found them yet, and he probably won’t unless he starts hanging out in the crew areas of the ship.

This time last year, he was was stationed planetside and they arranged leave. Ren made those little soup dumplings that Sanders was endlessly fascinated by and Sun made potstickers that were fried to a perfect golden brown, and someone smuggled in a shit ton of beer while someone in charge was deliberately short-sighted. Then the Americans showed up with the ugliest fish salad Maine had ever seen in his life, citing the only recipe that wasn’t mangled in translation, and it actually tasted pretty decent. The Germans brought spaezle, claiming it was a dumpling-shaped noodle, which must be twice as lucky. Before long it seemed like half the base was involved. What was it Le said? _The point isn’t the food or the rituals, cuz you know there isn’t a pair of us who can agree on the details. The point is we’re all here._

He pours oil into a pan and sets it over the burner. 20 frozen dumplings can squeeze into a ring around the edge, and they cook quickly since he isn’t trying to fry on a tiny camping stove that needs magic faerie dust to work. A generous splash of water goes in, and then more oil when the water’s gone, and the potstickers are ready to be turned onto a plate. They’re about the right colour, crisp on the outside and juicy on the inside, even if the contents were selected according to Maine’s debatably accurate memory, which is becoming increasingly insistent about providing points of comparison.

 _The point is_ , Le said, waving her third beer at a room full of people who Maine didn’t know personally but would probably drop everything to help on a moment’s notice. _You see the point._

 

_(Seven)_

And now he’s caught up. He’s done everything he’s supposed to have done, and now it’s the seventh day of the new year, when he’s supposed to be having dinner with Mom, Dad, and his assorted siblings. Where he’s from, his fake aunts and uncles and their kids are invited too, because it’s everyone’s birthday.

But he isn’t there. He’s here, on a ship with people he hasn’t met, in a corner of space he couldn’t place on a map, waiting for orders that may never come. And even though he tries, he _tries_ , he can’t make himself believe that this is going to get better. It’s been months at this posting and there’s so much wrong here he can’t articulate it all. It’s - it’s being part of a rag-tag group of soldiers who barely know each other, it’s a command that sows malcontent between the Freelancers and the rest of the crew, it’s -

It’s not home.

The potstickers go onto a platter and the pan goes in the sink. Maine half-leans-half-sits on the counter, working his way through dinner, which isn’t quite right, just like everything else has been not quite right. Fitting in its consistency, at least. He cleans up in silence. No one comes to disturb him. No one has, not once, not since he’s arrived on board.

A new image of Zao Shen goes up on the wall when he gets back to his quarters. It’s been seven days; the queue in Heaven must be exhausted. There isn’t much to report anyway. Maine hasn’t been a better or worse person than he’s ever been. Maybe that has something to do with his luck lately.

But this year will be better. This year, _he’ll_ be better. This year he will have a team and a purpose and something more than a metal box in an empty hallway on a soulless ship. There will be hurt and disaster, of course; he is a soldier, and there is a war on. But that won’t be everything. There will be late nights in the galley and early mornings on the training floor and cities of glass and highways that fall away behind him. There will be snow days and snow fights, and at the end of it all he will belong to something more than himself.

And until then, he’ll just have to make his own luck, one day at a time.

**Author's Note:**

> Started for Chinese New Year Feb 2016 for the now-defunct moiforum rp. Contains references to conversations and characterizations from the aforementioned.
> 
> I completed Halo 5 by hiding Master Chief behind various boxes and directing my AI squaddies to do all the shooting for me. Enough said about my knowledge of the Halo universe and details thereof.


End file.
